James Crabtree

James Crabtree is a geopolitical analyst and bestselling author with deep experience of Asia.

His book “The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age“, was named Amazon’s Best Book of the Year and shortlisted for the FT / McKinsey Business Book of the Year award. A colorful and revealing portrait of the rise of India’s new billionaire class in a radically unequal society, it provides a vivid account of a divided society on the cusp of transformation – and a struggle that will shape not just India’s future, but the world’s.

Crabtree is a distinguished visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. He was previously the Singapore-based Executive Director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies in Asia, where he organised the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, the region’s most important meeting of defence and security leaders. He was also an Associate Professor in Practice at the Lee Kuan Kew School, Asia’s leading school of public policy, teaching classes covering geopolitical, technological and economic change.

A highly successful journalist, James Crabtree spent ten years as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times, where he was both Bureau Chief in Mumbai and Comment Editor in London. He is currently a columnist for Foreign Policy and writes frequently for publications ranging from the FT and Straits Times to The New York Times, the Guardian and Wired.

Crabtree was a senior advisor in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, under Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. He has worked for various think tanks in London and Washington DC, and spent a number of years living in America, initially as a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

With his vast journalistic experience and work as a leading Asia analyst, James Crabtree is a highly sought after speaker on international relations, foreign security, geopolitics, globalisation and economics. He is currently writing his second book.